


Over Into Slumber

by elwing_alcyone



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Homestuck Kink Meme, POV Second Person, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Wordcount: Over 1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-18
Updated: 2012-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-29 18:22:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/elwing_alcyone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>TT: Sometimes I've gotta go round her up from some godforsaken cranny of the abyss. Drag her tipsy ass home, tuck her back in.</p><p>A few instances of Dirk taking care of Roxy while she's half-awake on Derse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over Into Slumber

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a [prompt](http://homesmut.livejournal.com/14212.html?thread=27198340#t27198340) on the kink meme.
> 
> Title's from [this poem](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181282), which honestly I just found by googling "poems about abyss", so it doesn't have any great relevance; I just liked that line.

The girl in the other tower is sprawled on the floor, fast asleep, the first time you go there. She doesn’t wake up when you shake her.

“I took a risk coming here, you know,” you say. “The very least you could do is be awake. How the hell did you get out of bed, anyway?”

At the sound of your voice she curls back in on herself, crossing her arms so that her hands rest on her shoulders, right to left and left to right. She looks cold there on the floor.

“Okay,” you say. “That’s fine for now, I guess. But if you’re still asleep next time, I’m bringing a bucket of cold water.”

You get an arm under her waist and half-carry, half-drag her across the room. She grumbles and paws at you, bracing one hand against your chest and trying to push you away, and a frown knots itself up between her eyebrows. You roll her back onto the bed and pull the blankets up around her, and she balls herself up with her back to you, as if to say, _Now get out of here, asshole._ You do.

 

The second time you visit her tower, you bring a book.

You know more now. You’ve spoken to her in the real world, and you’ve spent your sleeping hours learning more about Derse and the reality it inhabits. You know she probably won’t wake up for a while, but you think someone should be keeping an eye on her, just in case.

You read aloud to her, Theophrastus, and although she’s not the most attentive listener you could wish for, she turns towards your voice. Her hand creeps over the edge of the bed nearest you. You guess this means you’re not a stranger anymore.

 

The next few times you experiment, talking to her about certain topics and then bringing them up again when you’re both awake on Earth to see how much she retains. The answer is not much, but you keep trying anyway. Maybe repetition will help.

Her hair is fine and gets tangled easily, so you work your fingers through it sometimes while you read, smoothing it out. She’s pretty fucking vain, so you think she’d appreciate it.

Once when you leave her tower, you find her following you, still asleep, her arms and legs hanging loose, her eyelids flickering. You turn around and guide her back, and this time she doesn’t try to push you away.

 

One night – you’re still getting the hang of staying awake in both bodies – you go to her tower and she isn’t there. At a loss, you drift around outside for a while, trying to avoid the attention of the Derse agents and wondering if she could have woken up without your knowledge. It’s a while before you spot a scrap of purple flying on the dark side of the moon, lazily circling higher and higher into the void.

You catch up to her in no time and bring her back down, and she mumbles, “Fuck you, get off, lemme, lemme go, fuck you, you don’t tell me what to, you don’t fucking tell, I do what I...” But in spite of her words she clings to you, wraps her arms and legs around you like a little monkey and whispers her slurred admonishments into your shoulder.

“Indecisive, Lalonde,” you tell her when you get back to the tower, peeling her off you and wrapping her up so tightly in her blankets that even she’ll take a while to work free. “You’re all talk and you don’t know what the hell you really want. It’s hardly surprising you can’t sleep properly or wake up all the way. You ought to take my advice and stop drinking your mother’s liquor. It doesn’t improve you.”

“Insmufferable fuckin’ prick,” she mutters, and hides her face in the pillow. You settle in to deface a Derse tabloid. Roxy starts to snore.

 

After that she wanders more and more. Sometimes she roams through the streets, toes scraping the ground, until some Derse resident points her back towards the tower and gives her a push. Every now and then, though, you catch her buoying up into the abyss like a kid’s helium balloon cut loose.

Even Derse agents don’t like to look up into that speaking darkness. If you’re honest with yourself, you have to admit it makes you uneasy as well. You wonder what its magnetism is for Roxy. You wonder why you always find her staring up at it. It’s the only time she opens her eyes.

“Come on,” you’ll say, taking her by the shoulders and steering her back towards the moon. “No space travel for you today. Jake’s blue space-furry girlfriend will have to wait a little longer for you to introduce her to the joys of getting totally fucking hammered. That wasn’t innuendo, by the way.”

“Fuck _you_ ,” she’ll say right back, as if she’s really hearing you, but her words will be blunted and her mouth will be in funny shapes, and then she’ll turn into a limpet, every time.

“Is this because mater familias didn’t give you enough affection growing up?” you ask back in the tower, as you pry her off you and disentangle her fingers from your rad as fuck purple pajamas and push the hair back from her face, brisk and matter-of-fact. “Is it the alcohol? Or were you just born a human face-hugger? Your aim is for shit, incidentally. My face is up here.”

“Shu’up,” she mumbles, and she’s still grimacing and twisting her mouth about and grinding her teeth, still reaching up for cuddles, and you sigh.

“You’re going to have to wake up soon. I’ve got a wager with the auto-responder that you wake up before Jane. Are you going to let the fucking auto-responder win? You hate him even more than you hate me.”

She wriggles up out of bed and tries to make a break for the window again. You catch her easily enough, calming her with a cool hand on her flushed cheeks, settling her back on the pillows.

“Hell no. You’ve gazed long enough into the abyss, at least for today.”

Her hand is clamped around your sleeve. She’s the real-life velcro woman. Just when you think she’s successfully detached, you find her hooked in somewhere else.

“How the fuck is this facade supposed to last when I spend half of my time in here with you?” you complain. “Somebody’s going to notice I’m not as asleep as they think.”

But there’s room for you to sit on the bed, and she’s still drunk and listing towards the dark outside her window, and you know if you leave she’ll only go floating off again. You figure you can stay a while, if she needs an anchor.


End file.
